Designed to be random-access capable, it attempts to be both high-performance and memory-efficient. In addition, because VTD is inherent persistent, it can be saved on disk along side the XML document to achieve "parse-once, use many times.

" The "non-extractive" nature of VTD means that incremental, dynamic updates don't require re-serialization of irrelevant parts of the original document.

On a 1.5gHz Athlon PC, VTD-XML consistently outperforms SAX parsers with NULL content handler, delivering 25~35 MB/sec sustained throughput, without sacrifice random access. Its memory usage is typical between 1.3x~1.5 x the size of the XML document, with 1 being the XML itself.